New Releases in the Time of Implementation

You know the old adage, "the only thing constant is change." This is certainly true with Workday! In addition to doing weekly updates and fixes, twice per year Workday puts out huge release updates to roll out new features, feature improvements, bug fixes, and more. The most recent of these huge releases just went live on September 10th, 2022. And when we say huge, we mean huge! During a six week preview period, Workday adds parts of the releases to our test environment - some of which take effect without the customer needing to do anything, and some of which need to be enabled by the customer - and our "behind the scenes" Workday users review these items. They see if the functionality will be useful to us and learn how it works, testing it repeatedly to understand how it works for our instance of Workday. It takes a lot of time and energy to review all of these items!

So how many items rolled out to users for this September's release? Altogether this September, Workday rolled out nearly 4000 updates, for an average of roughly 550 updates per preview week! The good news for Bowdoin, at least for now, is that because we aren't yet live with Finance or with Student, we really only needed to work on reviewing updates that related to HR, Expenses, and Payroll, along with any system-wide changes. That still involved a lot of updates!

And, of course, we are still in the midst of our Finance implementation, meaning that functionality is changing on the fly while we are learning. Don't forget that our friends in Payroll and Expenses are also involved in this Finance implementation, so for a few of our team, they were reviewing new functionality while doing the implementation while doing their day jobs! Luckily, our Payroll and Expenses colleagues are top-notch, and our Alchemy consultants keep up to date on releases and updates that Workday puts out, so they are all well-equipped to help us see and review new tools that may help us out now and in the future.